It is hard to imagine many subjects filling up a community centre in Hereford for a local election debate on a drizzly evening. But public concern is high in the town over water pollution, dominating a recent talk attended by more than a hundred people when prospective Labour, Tory and Green councillors answered residents’ questions on sewage works’ effluent, agricultural run-off and more.
The reason is simple according to Jamie Audsley, chief executive of the Herefordshire Wildlife Trust, which organised last week’s “river hustings”. “The River Wye is dying, polluted with phosphates, veiled in algae and smothered with sediment,” he said.
A big cause of the Wye’s decline has been the “manure mountains” created by chicken farms. The results of Thursday’s local election matter because local planning decisions on such farms are seen as part of the solution.
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The state of the country’s waterways has risen from a niche issue to a hot topic in this week’s vote. Labour is campaigning on it and the Liberal Democrats and Greens are both majoring on the issue, particularly in coastal areas.
“This story fits into a wider one about the decaying public realm — try getting a bus or an operation for a chronic illness or a dentist. This is all part of the same feeling, that nothing is working,” said Oxford Brookes University’s Glen O’Hara, the author of a book on water politics.
“People are really angry at the amount of raw sewage being allowed to spill into our rivers and seas,” said Adrian Ramsay, the Greens’ co-leader. The Greens are prioritising the issue in Waveney, Suffolk, where Ramsay hopes to later become MP, and across a swathe of southern England including Babergh in Suffolk, Wealden in East Sussex, Winchester in Hampshire and Somerset’s Mendip district.
Lewes, in East Sussex, is a focus for a rainbow of parties. Conservative candidates’ leaflets promise to “protect our local coastline and green spaces from pollution”, while Lib Dems say they are “fighting against sewage dumps”. The issue features on Green leaflets too.
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Ramsay pointed out that his party’s councillors in Lewes recently helped pass a motion to protect the rights of the River Ouse. Many of the levers for increasing the health of England’s rivers, as The Times’s Clean it Up campaign has been calling for, rest at the national level, including the strength of regulators Ofwat and the Environment Agency.
“We do need action on a national level. But councils can use their planning powers to make new developments show their impact on water and sewage, and how that would be managed,” said Ramsay.
The Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey recently visited the banks of the Ouse in Lewes as part of his local elections tour. This week he was in Winchester with parliamentary candidate Danny Chambers for the River Itchen, a chalk stream of a type highlighted as globally rare by Sir David Attenborough’s Wild Isles TV show. After finding that chalk streams and “blue wall” battleground seats tend to overlap, the Lib Dems hope to capitalise on an issue Davey said makes Tory voters “very, very angry”.
Party officials said they found locals in Hertfordshire this week were “furious” about sewage spills into chalk streams, which exist only in England, France and Denmark. The Conservatives have tended to be on the back foot, having been in power for 13 years during which sewage spills have become more visible. They have tried to regain the initiative by recently unveiling a “plan for water” and enshrining in law a target to end sewage spills.
The Tory MP and former environment secretary George Eustice said he found political attacks by the Lib Dems and Labour “deeply frustrating”. He said his plan to force water firms to spend £56 billion tackling sewage spills would “make a real difference” but would take time.
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“The truth is that during the coalition years, not enough was done on this. There was a prioritisation around reducing bills and probably a different decision could have been taken,” he said. Between 2013 and 2015, Eustice noted, the water minister was Dan Rogerson, a Lib Dem. However, between 2010 and 2013 it was Richard Benyon, a Conservative. All environment secretaries in the coalition years were Tories.
Sam Hall, director of the Conservative Environment Network, a grouping of more than a hundred “green Tories”, said the party could win back local support by supporting subsidies for farmers to reduce their impact on rivers. “The debate is often dominated by sewage, but parties need to put forward plans to slash all sources of pollution if we’re going to restore our rivers to a healthy condition,” he said.
O’Hara said while opposition parties had become very good at “micro-targeting” campaigns on water pollution, the fixes would take time regardless of the local election results. “The solutions to the tide of sewage are not going to be quick and they’re not going to be easy.”
The Times is demanding faster action to improve the country’s waterways. Find out more about the Clean It Up campaign.
